The wince bit is obvious. You may still be "raised" on a potato farm in Tipperary or in a Tennessee shack with Dolly Parton. You might even be raised in the Bronx before moving to Broadway, if you're Woody and 70-plus. But no one is raised in the amorphous non-place Emma calls her Belgravia home.

Conceived on Tuscan honeymoon; delivered at the London Clinic; schooled by Badminton; finished in Switzerland and at Oxford secretarial colleges; holidays just outside Antibes or at the family's Sussex pile? This Emma (aka Chloe) might conceivably say she shares a flat with two other girls just behind Harvey Nicks, but she wouldn't dream of mentioning Ruritania SW1.

That isn't the only bizarre dislocation in Match Point. Mummy and daddy going on about "Time for a G and T" heralds a whole string of them. Nevertheless the movie has, amazingly, brought Woody himself Golden Globe and now Oscar nominations for "best" and "best original" screenplay.

The old master is back - with wonderful box-office results in Paris and many other European places. The Globes, remember, are chosen by foreign correspondents on hardship posting in Hollywood. These American awards have an international gloss - and drop heavy hints to Oscar nominating committees short of a few best-originals. There may be more pong than ping on offer, but Woody still wins a big game as critics invoke comparisons with Dostoevsky.

However, when you identify such dementia, when you realise that supremely clunky dialogue doesn't grate on French or Californian tin ears, certain discommoding conclusions follow.

One means looking into your inner soul and asking an awful question. If this were a French film by, say, Claude Chabrol, and you were reading subtitles not gagging with horror, wouldn't you think it a pretty fine night out? Answer: quite possibly. Sous-titres, in their art-house way, hide a multitude of cliched things. They make us forgive and compensate in our own minds, writing great lines as we go along. (The divine Gong Li, the best Chinese actress of the past 20 years, sounds like Widow Twankey in Memoirs of a Geisha, forced to speak an English more masochist than Mandarin.)

In sum, an inability to communicate adds cachet: a second-remove protective sheen of quality. And when we do hear the results direct - as in Match Point - then awful questions proliferate. For if they, that lot over there in Santa Monica or Montmartre, can't tell idiom from idiocy, what makes us so sure that we aren't tone deaf and place blind, too? Woody Allen has been slipping off the US movie map for nearly a quarter of century after all, sustained by audiences over here, not over there. Did his American dialogue begin to grate on American ears, then, while none of us noticed the difference? Are we, in turn, divided by a common language and a series of wretchedly ignorant geographical references?

You'd have to acknowledge that possibility if you stayed talking Oscars. The "best foreign" (ie non-English-speaking) films rarely make top grades. Would Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon have taken the prize if its stars had been forced to speak Chinglish? And Oscar's penchant for overblown war stories (message: war is bad) would surely have left Joyeux Noel behind Jarhead if subtitles didn't rush to its rescue.

But movies are only the beginning, not the end, of this argument. A lifetime's hapless exposure to American TV sitcoms and cop shows makes us assume we speak their language perfectly: and much of the time, perhaps that's right. They can be superbly sophisticated on the West Wing except when they produce Lord John, a Brit ambassador straight out of Blandings Castle. We must be worldly-wise and forgiving.

But - as a non-addicted follower of George Bush - I had a nasty turn half way through the state of the union. He sounds so damned clunky, trapped between drawl and boom; cadences agley, emphases random, eyes teleprompter-blank. He'd surely be better with subtitles ... Unless I, like millions around the globe, still can't tune into his ultimate wavelength, born and raised in the US.